I'm busy trying to recover from catastrophic computer failure in my main machine. A sudden spontaneous reboot led to C: drive disk errors that caused more machine crashes every time XP booted. Finally a chkdsk cleared that up, but left my XP install unstable and broken. So I moved off my info and wiped that partition, planning to reinstall Windows. Problem was that XP install then would not recognize the partitions on that drive. Any of them, which was a problem, since the larger partition was for storage. I copied everything I felt was important to keep (about 100GB) and cleared the whole damn drive to repartition it. XP install still wouldn't recognize the new partition. Neither would the old copy of Partition Magic I have on a boot disk. Grr!

While the drive was in my secondary computer, everyone worked fine. That's how I got the data off and repartitioned it. But once back in my main machine, there were problems. Finally I had XP install set up the partitions and go along with the install. And this is when it decided it had to do a chkdsk on my other hard disk (my applications partition) and completely hosed it. Error after error after error. Dozens of folders are now missing. Not only that, but the new C: partition also developed errors that required a chkdsk run, right after a complete disk reformat, repartition, and XP installation. So my machine is in shambles. I may have lost personal irreplaceable data from my applications drive that is unrecoverable. I think the problem may be a bad IDE controller or cables, since errors were spontaneously occurring on two separate physical drives. Tomorrow I'll pick up a new card and cables and go about the fucking frustrating and ponderous task of trying to recover what I can from my hosed applications drive.